woody allen

what is it about auteur comedians with carefully cultivated, "relatable" personae? CK was the 21st century woody allen. cosby was a little different, but he was still had a kind of public persona that made the accusations really feel hard to believe

I sure related to Allen, for a long time in my life, I took the Farrow letter in the NY Times to realize the amount of misogyny I had cultivated myself.

I agree with Left that there is something tragic about needing an extra layer of voyeurism, which is what those documentaries seems to be, for some people to accept that these men are monsters. Like we are judges and we are given more evidence in the form of the entertainment and only then we can decide if yes or no the victim was right to open up.

I think Cosby was way more shocking, he was like America's dad for people in the 80s when I was watching the Cosby Show...Allen and CK were both weird and edgy at times, and all full of hang ups about sex and women (in their work). I mean jfc Allen made Manhattan and there was an episode of Louie that revolved around Louie sexually assaulting a woman.

The Cosby Show really portrayed a healthy marriage with a healthy sex life between two age appropriate adults

i related to allen a lot as a teen. i outgrew his films by the time i got to college, but they definitely formed my sense of myself as someone who was "intellectual," who could namedrop philosophers and russian authors, and who wanted to live, someday, in new york (where else?). i honestly wonder what kind of person i would be today if i didn't learn, from allen's movies and other movies, to look down on my suburban upbringing and identify with, idk, some ad-hoc vision of upper class new york bohemia, a place where people were droll and ironic and self-referential and all the rest

you are paying an awful lot of rent to emulate a creep.

i don't live there anymore. i can still see the skyline from where i am sitting though.

faintly

I'm joking Treeship, NYC's allure had the same effect on me for a long time and for similar reasons. I know exactly what you are talking about.

But yeah I don't understand what is the purpose of those documentaries other than to serve strange instincts. Are they truly useful as a tool to better understand rape culture?

the allen documentaries? i don't think it's about "rape culture" as much as about how someone who seems normal can be a child molester

Allen was definitely what I thought of as "movies for adults" when I was a kid. My dad still had Without Feathers and Getting Even and I read them at a pretty young age and thought they were funny but I probably didn't fully understand.

He was such a touchstone of what was "a great director" for a good part of my growing up.

Woody Allen: makes nine movies in a row about wanting to fuck teenagers who are too sheltered to realise what a creep he is
dr treeship: "relatable, hard to imagine he'd be a creep"

Louis CK: releases seven hour-long monologues about how he's a pathetic creep with a tiny dick and his body is visually unappealing, but ppl should just let him bust near them bcz men gotta have it
dr treeship: "relatable, hard to imagine he'd be a creep"

Bill Cosby: talks repeatedly about how the greatest dream of every man is finding a substance with which you can drug unwilling women in order to have sex with them, then spends several decades insisting in public that he is an avatar of morality and anyone who ever speaks openly about expressing sexuality is a societal problem who ought to shut the double-hockey-sticks up, and privately cold-calling strangers to order them to shut up
dr treeship: "relatable, hard to imagine he'd drug unwilling women and then attempt to gaslight the public for decades about it if they ever speak out, in order to reinforce his image and frighten other women away from speaking out

I suspect each of them simply had the confidence of living in a society that shames victims and protects abusers, far more than that they were consciously creating fake non-abusive aspects of their personae as a stalking horse

someone who seems normal

citation needed

well, woody knew better than to make a movie about molesting a 7 year old. i think the point is that woody and ck seemed to reveal "the worst" of themselves. i think that was a way of concealing that there was actually more to the story.

like, what allen has done is far more than "being a creep."

sic you're being too harsh to treeship on Cosby at least, while those are aspects of his career that are well known now, his whole thing in the 80s and 90s at least was all about being wholesome and innocuous

Here's the trick: I don't know about Cosby's work, but Allen and CK were highly relatable because they were misogynists.

with both Woody and CK a huge part of what made their art transgressive (and popular i think) is/was their willingness to challenge social mores and boundaries about sexuality - how and when we talk about it, what we're willing to own up to, what behaviors are and are not acceptable. in that respect it shouldn't surprise people that they weren't, in actuality, maintaining their own boundaries of acceptable behavior and respect for others' humanity. Cosby is way way more nefarious imo

I watched the Cosby Show every week like everyone else and have seen the spanish fly bit now in reference to him being a rapist, but it's not like stand-up was big on TV back then, I remember my uncle having one of his records but I never saw him as a stand-up, I don't think people were relating to him as anything other than Heathcliffe Huxtable.

And relating goes both way, when you believe someone is just like you, it’s hard to imagine that they would do something horrible.

right. with allen and ck what i connected with was the self-deprecation. these were guys who weren't very sure of themselves, and they turned their weaknesses into strengths, making fun of themselves. the misoyny in allen's films is obvious in retrospect but wasn't what i saw when i was a 15 year old. i don't think it's what i related to.

there is a whole article in the new yorker about ck's self-deprecation and hatred of the body. the author compares him to nikolai gogol, and says that he is pushing through self-hatred, toward misanthropy, and onto the other side, to a place of sympathy. his work was very beloved and people saw it as humane. it is a falsification of the past to say that everyone saw it as misogynistic at the time, as dr. sic seems to suggest

The majority of that self-depreciation comes from how women view and act with them as men.

Allen had been publicly funny as a stand-up, published writer and latterly a film performer/maker for nearly 20 years before "40-yo man fucks teenager" became part of his work, and much of that work was about sexual screwed-up-ness at whatever age he was at the time. And American mainstream film was largely in favour of teenagers fucking 40-yos until, approximately, last week: the extreme naif that Hemingway plays is what read as the larger red flag than her age.

CK acted his fetish out in public, making sexual inadequacy and mimed masturbation a major part of his work. It seems that he was sincere in expecting people to find this relatable, and the immediacy with which ppl realised it was him when blind items began appearing in 2012 show there was no fooling. It's far more horrifying that Dave Becky hasn't been cancelled yet (the Golden Globes were two days ago!) than that some audiences are still happy to pay CK.

I don't have enough of a handle on Cosby's rewriting of his persona from stand-up to movie star to TV paterfamilias to judge how much of any of them were crafted as a cover, but he was drugging and raping women through each phase of his career, from the 1960s on.

xps

Cosby as Cliff Huxtable presented himself as ambassador to Blackness. Dizzy Gillesie, B.B. King, the family dancing to "I Got the Feelin'" and "Nighttime is the Right Time," allusions to Zora Neale Hurston -- for a Latino in Miami, I can't separate my experiences with these artists from learning about them from The Cosby Show. He made rather a show of his smarts -- the last credit refers to "William H. Cosby, Ed.D."

sic you're being too harsh to treeship on Cosby at least, while those are aspects of his career that are well known now, his whole thing in the 80s and 90s at least was all about being wholesome and innocuous

yeah idk, maybe if you watched his sitcom or saw him in TV commercials. if you saw his book in every hospital and newsagent, had only seen him talking in a bit of Uptown Saturday Night or Mother, Jugs & Speed on TV. and knew the Eddie Murphy story from someone bringing the tape to a school camp, wholesome Cosby might seem like a fake cover for someone trying to impose control on others.

Yes Cosby had that spanish fly joke in the 70's but there was absolutely nothing else that would have led the public to believe he was capable of the shit he pulled.

He made rather a show of his smarts -- the last credit refers to "William H. Cosby, Ed.D."

I worked with Bill Cosby on fat Albert. He had two of the writers write his PHD thesis.

- Sam Simon (@simonsam), Dec. 17, 2014

sic you're being too harsh to treeship on Cosby at least, while those are aspects of his career that are well known now, his whole thing in the 80s and 90s at least was all about being wholesome and innocuous

yeah idk, maybe if you watched his sitcom or saw him in TV commercials. if you saw his book in every hospital and newsagent, had only seen him talking in a bit of Uptown Saturday Night or Mother, Jugs & Speed on TV. and knew the Eddie Murphy story from someone bringing the tape to a school camp, wholesome Cosby might seem like a fake cover for someone trying to impose control on others.

― grab bag cum trash bag (sic), Tuesday, March 2, 2021 4:09 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

a vast majority of people didn't know about all that shit and just knew him from commercials and the sitcom

like maybe fat albert was as far back as it went, and that was certainly far more well known than anything you're talking about

Being an annoying, scolding social conservative is one thing. Cosby was obviously that. But i think it’s a stretch to think that people in the 90s or whatever should have known he was a serial rapist.

There are different forms of badness.

i mean my first exposure to Cosby was on Picture Pages, teaching math to preschoolers while interacting with an animated marker. then graduated to the Huxtables and Ghost Dad. it's absurd to claim that in the pre-internet era his general audience was or should have been aware of the red flags in his behavior and story

Mine too.

totally

the cosby show, family ties, cheers, night court block on NBC thursday nights was like insanely popular in an era when network television still ruled everything in the U.S. all that other shit, uptown saturday night, mother jugs and speed was like so so so far out of what most people knew about

i feel like we're arguing whether more people heard of "jump" by van halen or "jump" by aztec camera

Considering how Allen continued to thrive long after the Soon-Yi Previn scandal it's fair to ask if people knew about Cosby would it have triggered anything.

i have literally never heard of mother jugs and speed until right now

Cosby was a regular on talk shows, where people would have seen his stand up.

important to note that the Cosby Show's prime was in a pre-Simpsons era where sitcoms were way more wholesome and formulaic - not far removed from the time where actresses routinely got booted off their shows for getting pregnant. someone like Charlie Sheen couldn't have come within 100 miles of a network sitcom back then.

Look at what happened with One Day at a Time's Mackenzie Phillips.

And his LPs were big sellers. I don't remember the Spanish fly bit but his material was generally inoffensive.

I still like Jello Pudding.

I'd bet around the mid 80s he was among the most broadly known and liked people in America

driving in SF is still a great piece. he was a very good stand up.

"Considering how Allen continued to thrive long after the Soon-Yi Previn scandal it's fair to ask if people knew about Cosby would it have triggered anything"

probably, because unlike Allen, Cosby is black and generally people are faster to condemn a black celebrity for shit than a white counterpart (though I guess R. Kelly is an exception here)

Cosby's victims were mostly white, though, while Kelly's are entirely black

good point

fuck Woody Allen for life; i wish i had not allowed him to colonize my brain when i was a teenager.